[R-sig-teaching] R in intro stats

Bob Dobrow rdobrow at carleton.edu
Fri Oct 27 15:24:12 CEST 2006


I'm glad to see this sig list up and running.

I'm planning to use R for my *intro* stats class in the Winter. This is 
an experiment,
as our intro stats classes all use SPSS. So I'm using R for this one 
section (out of about 8 sections
a year).  I want to see (1) how easy/hard it is for
students to work in a command line environment and (2) whether there is some
pedagogical advantage to working with command lines rather than just 
point-and-click.

We've taken our GUI-based SPSS lab manual and rewritten it for R. If 
anyone would like to see it I can make it available. I'll probably need 
to supplement it with some very basic intro tutorials or
worksheets giving basic introduction. I do not intend to have these 
students (mostly poli sci,
econ and bio) writing scripts. But I do intend to use R lots in-class 
simulations and
presentations. If anyone has used R in the intro class I'd be interested 
in hearing your experiences.

Bob Dobrow
Carleton College




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